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‘Most like, most like. Here, lad, I must have pushed you too hard. You go back to bed now and rest. We’ll try sitting up again tomorrow.’
Once they had Perryn settled and the guard back at the door, Nevyn and Elaeno returned to the old man’s chamber in the main broch. They sat down with a tankard of mulled ale each to discuss what they’d witnessed.
‘I suppose his killers looked ugly to him now because he’s grown used to human beings,’ Elaeno said.
‘Oho! You’re assuming that those beings were his own kind of people.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘I’m tempted, truly, but I also think that it’s very unwise to make any assumptions about Perryn at all.’
‘Now there I’d most certainly agree with you. Huh. Big noses and bristling black eyebrows. I suppose they could be the goblins or ogres of many an old tale, either from the islands or your kingdom. Odd, how our folk stories do seem to be pretty much alike, with sorcerers, dragons, and some sort of evil ugly being.’
‘Except this isn’t a tale, but a memory.’
‘True.’ Elaeno had a thoughtful sip of his ale from the tankard cradled in his enormous hands. ‘Well, if they weren’t his people, then he’s from some race or other that lives near our big-nosed friends.’
‘What is clear is that he died violently and in anger and hatred. It might be enough to make his spirit flee at the death moment and stray far enough away to get caught up in the wrong sort of birth vortex.’
‘So it seems. And it was his ill-luck that the womb that caught him was kin to Tieryn Benoic.’
‘Who by all accounts was the last man in the kingdom to understand what a strange fish his wife’s sister had netted.’ Nevyn shook his head in bafflement. ‘Well, when he’s stronger we’ll try the fire-vision again, but I think me we’d better wait some days.’
‘He couldn’t take the strain right now, truly. How goes the other hunt?’
‘For our murdering troublemaker? Very badly indeed. For a while there I thought I was on his trail, but he’s disappeared. The stinking gall of him, trying to attack the child! If I get my claws into him, I’ll tear him limb from limb, I swear it.’
‘He doubtless knows it, too. Once he realized that you were looking for him, he probably ran off somewhere to hide.’ Elaeno considered the problem for a moment. ‘Well, maybe if he’s properly scared, he’ll leave us alone.’
‘Always full of hope and raw optimism, aren’t you? No doubt he’ll lie quiet for a while, but he’ll come back. His kind always does, like a witch’s curse.’
After being in attendance on the King for two long months, both pleading his cousin Rhodry’s cause and tending to business of his own, Blaen, Gwerbret Cwm Pecl, was profoundly relieved to ride home to his own city of Dun Hiraedd. With the fall harvest his taxes were coming in, and he spent a pleasurable pair of days playing the role of the rough country lord, standing round his ward with the chamberlain and bailiffs and counting up the pigs and chickens, cheeses and barrels of apples, sacks of flour (both white and barley,) tuns of mead and ale, as well as the occasional hard coin that was his due. He had a private word or a jest for every man who came to deliver his taxes, whether he was a lord’s chamberlain riding ahead of a pair of laden ox-carts or a local farmer carrying a wicker cage of rabbits on his back and a sack of flour in his arms.
Yet soon enough he left the taxes to his highly efficient staff and decided instead to make a small progress among his vassals. There were many lords that he hadn’t seen since the spring at the great feast of Beltane, and he liked to keep a personal eye on potential squabblers and grumblers. He had another reason, as well: to look for some likely parcel of land, at least ten farmsteads’ worth, to bestow on Rhodry’s woman, Gilyan, Cullyn of Cerrmor’s daughter, along with letters patent of nobility. Although, with a good half of his demesne wilderness, finding the land would be easy, enticing the free farmers to work it was another matter indeed. What counted now, though, was that Jill have land and a title of her own; the income would be superfluous once she was married to Rhodry and he’d been installed in Aberwyn.
Since his wife, Canyffa, was pregnant, Blaen left her behind to rule dun and rhan in his stead and took only some twenty-five men of his warband along as an honour guard. They rode north first, stopping at Cae Labradd and the dun of the tieryn, Riderrc. To celebrate the gwerbret’s visit there was a great feast one night, and a hunting party the next day, but on the third day Blaen told the tieryn that he wanted merely to ride around the rhan on his own. With only five men for an escort he set out in mid-morning, but rather than viewing the tieryn’s fields and woods, he rode straight for town.
Just at the outskirts of Cae Labradd, on the banks of a tributary that flowed into the Canaver a few miles on, stood a brewery that was known as the best in all Cwm Pecl. Set behind a low, grassy earthenwork wall was a cluster of round buildings, freshly white-washed and neatly thatched, the brewer’s living quarters, the malt house, the drying house, the brewing house proper, the storage sheds and, off to one side, the pigsty and the cow barn. When Blaen turned off the road and led his men toward the brewery, they all cheered him, quite spontaneously and sincerely.
Over the door of the main house hung a rough broom of birch twigs, scented with strong ale, a sign that customers could buy a tankard or a tun as it suited them. When Blaen and his men dismounted, a stout grey-haired woman with a long white apron over her blue dress hurried out and curtsied.
‘Oh my, oh my, it’s the gwerbret himself! Veddyn, get out here! It’s the gwerbret and his men! Oh my, oh my! Your Grace, such a great honour. Oh you must try some of our new dark and there’s a cask of bitter, too. Oh my, oh my!’
‘Don’t dither, woman! Gods! You’ll drive his grace daft.’ Tall and lean, hawk-nosed and perfectly bald, Veddyn strolled out and made Blaen a perfunctory bow. ‘Honoured, Your Grace. What brings you to us?’
‘Thirst, mostly, good Veddyn. Do you have tankards enough for me and mine?’
‘It’d be a poor brewery that couldn’t serve six travellers, Your Grace. Just you all tie up those horses and come inside.’
Blaen handed his captain a handful of silver to pay for the ale, ushered his men inside, then lingered briefly in the yard with Twdilla while Veddyn followed them in. Once they were alone she dropped her dithery ways.
‘I take it that Your Grace is here for news?’
‘That, and to look in on Camdel, poor lad. Is he any better?’
‘Quite a bit, actually, but he’ll never be right in the head again after what they did to him.’ She crossed her fingers in the sign of warding against witchcraft. ‘He’s mucking out the cow barn at the moment, so I’ll wager Your Grace doesn’t want …’
‘By the gods, it doesn’t matter to me what he smells like. Let’s stroll over, shall we?’
As it turned out, they found Camdel sitting behind the cow barn on an old stump and eating his lunch, a chunk of bread and slices of yellow cheese laid out neatly on an old linen napkin. When he saw Blaen he got up and bowed with a sweeping courtly gesture that went ill with his dirty shirt and brown brigga, but although his eyes betrayed a flicker of recognition, he didn’t truly remember Blaen and had to be told his name. He was, however, physically healthy again and even somewhat happy, smiling as he spoke of his quiet life at the brewery. Blaen was well-pleased. The last time he’d seen the man, Camdel had been a quivering shrieking wreck, stick-thin and utterly mad from the tortures of those who followed the dark dweomer.
And now, or so Blaen had been told, his beloved cousin was in the hands of those same evil men. Although he generally could keep the thought at bay, at times, when he least expected it, when he was talking with some vassal or merely walking down a corridor or looking idly from a window, the memory would rise up like an assassin and stab him: Rhodry could be suffering like Camdel did. With the thought came a breathless rage, a gasp for air that seared his chest and made him swear yet one more time a vengeance vow: if these evil magicians had made his cousin suffer for so much as the length of a cock-crow, then nothing on earth, not king nor dweomer, would stop him from raising an army and sweeping down on Bardek like a flock of eagles, even if he had to bankrupt his rhan and call in every honour-debt and alliance anyone had ever owed him. Since he made the vow to his gods as well as to the honour of his clan, it was no idle boast.
He would have been surprised to know that the Dark Brotherhoods knew of his rage but pleased to learn that they feared it.
The central plateau and especially the hill country of southern Surtinna, the biggest island of the Bardekian archipelago, was at that time sparsely populated, a vast sweep of rolling downs descending from the knife-edge of a young mountain range. Nominally the downs came under the jurisdiction of the archons of Pastedion and Vardeth, who parcelled out land-grants to their supporters at whim, since the hawks and field-mice who lived there never bothered to argue about it. The land-owners in turn rented out parcels for farms or cattle ranches or even, in a few rare cases, for summer homes and country retreats for the rich. Although the income from the grants was sparse, the prestige was enormous. As a further benefit, the archons and the laws were far, far away, so that a grant holder could live as he pleased, rather like a Deverry lord.
Up in the heart of the hill country, right under the looming, pine-black mountains, lay one particular estate that had been bought and built some seventy years earlier by a retired civil servant named Tondalo. Although it received rents from some free-born cattle ranchers, its own slaves raised enough food and linen and so on for it to be fairly self-sufficient. Only rarely did any of its slaves turn up at the market down in Ganjalo, the local town; even more rarely did visitors come to its gates. Since the few neighbours were too busy working their own land to pry into its affairs, everyone assumed that the third generation of Tondalo’s heirs were running the estate. They would have been shocked to learn that the old man himself was still alive, though by no means in good health.
In truth, of course, Tondalo could have no heirs, because he was a eunuch, castrated as a boy to deny him a family and thus limit his interests to Vardeth’s civil service. Since he had a brilliant mind for detail, he’d risen high and taken an active hand in the politics of his town, becoming rich enough to buy first his freedom, then an impressive house in the city, and finally this lonely estate. Now, at a hundred and sixty-odd years old (he really couldn’t remember just when he’d been born) he lived in necessary seclusion. Not only had he grown so grossly fat (a hated legacy of his castration rather than any natural result of a love for pleasure and good eating) that travel was nearly impossible for him, but he needed privacy for his work. He had immersed himself so long and so thoroughly in the craft of the dark dweomer that he was as much of a leader as their chaos-sworn brotherhood could have. To his fellow practitioners of the dark arts he no longer had any name at all. He was simply the Old One.
Of course, most times he had no need to travel. Scrying in a basin of black ink kept him in touch with the other members of the Dark Council and also brought him direct visions of the doings of his various allies and minions throughout Surtinna. Every now and then a messenger arrived, bearing books and the necessary supplies for his various workings. (The messengers never left again, of course, at least not alive.) When the full Council met, it did so in an image-temple out on the astral plane, not somewhere in the hills or cities of Bardek. Yet on occasion he sincerely wished that he could travel on important errands instead of having to trust the younger students of the dark arts to run them for him. By its very nature, studying dark dweomer tends to make a man untrustworthy in the extreme.
Such a case was this matter of Rhodry Maelwaedd. If he’d been capable of it, the Old One would have gone to Deverry himself to supervise this crucial kidnapping and the disposition of its victim. As it was, since he’d had to entrust the job to a disciple on the one hand and hired assassins on the other, now he fretted constantly, wondering if the job had been done right. He couldn’t simply scry them out to see because all the important actions had happened either in Deverry itself or on another island, and not even the greatest dweomer minds in the world could scry across large bodies of open water. The exhalations of elemental force, particularly over the ocean proper, quite simply obscured the images like a fog. If he had tried to travel across them in the body of light, the waves and poundings of this same force would have broken up his astral form and led to his death.
So he could only sit in his villa and wait and brood. What particularly worried him was the complexity of the plan. If nothing else, he’d learned from his days in government that the more complex any project was, the more likely it was to fail, and this one had as many twists and turns as a bit of Deverry interlace. If he’d had a couple of years to spend, he would have thought and meditated until he’d honed some scheme as sharp and simple as a sword-blade, but time had been short and the threat too present to allow such a luxury. Over the past decades various followers of the dark path had worked hard to establish a secure foothold in Deverry, particularly in the court of the High King himself. Just when their plans were maturing, Nevyn ferreted them out and in one ugly summer destroyed much of their work. In many other ways the old man was a threat to the very existence of the dark dweomer as well as a hated personal enemy of Tondalo’s. As he considered all these things, the Old One had resolved, the winter before, that Nevyn should die.
An easy thing to resolve, of course; not so easy to execute. First of all, the Old One would have to act mostly alone, because he quite simply couldn’t trust anyone to help him. Those members of the Dark Brotherhood who coveted his place and prestige were more than capable of betraying him to Nevyn at the last moment simply to get rid of him. If he wanted reliable allies, he would have to pay for them in cold cash and keep his real intent secret as well. There were highly skilled assassins available for hire in the islands – at least to a man who knew where to find them. The summer before, the Old One had hired a guild of these Hawks of the Brotherhood, as they were called, to carry out part – but only part – of his plans.
Since sending a simple killer against a man of Nevyn’s power would have been laughable, the Old One had figured out a way to lure him to the islands, where his powers, drawn as they were from the Deverry soul and the Deverry earth, would be greatly lessened, and he would be far from the secular aid of such as Gwerbret Blaen. By all the laws of magic, in Bardek the Old One should be striking from the position of strength, the mental high ground, as it were, especially since Nevyn always seemed to work alone and thus would most likely come alone. When he looked around for bait for his trap, he fixed upon Rhodry, who was important to the barbarian kingdom’s future as well as one of Nevyn’s personal friends. Although his first thought was to merely kill the lad after using him to lay a false trail, he knew that Nevyn might be able to scry on the highest mental plane and discover that Rhodry was dead. It was most improbable that the Master of the Aethyr would come barrelling across the seas just to give the boy a decent burial or suchlike. On the other hand, keeping him prisoner in his villa would have been dangerous, too, once Nevyn came ferreting around on the track of the bait. The Old One had no desire to go running – or waddling, as he wryly told himself – for his life like a badger flushed out of his hole.
No, it had seemed best to bring Rhodry to Bardek, wipe his memory clean so that he couldn’t simply go to one of the law-abiding archons and announce his true identity, then turn him loose, hidden in plain sight as an ordinary slave, drifting wherever his fate or his luck took him. Sooner or later, Nevyn would follow. And when he did, the Old One would be waiting for him.
PART ONE
Bardek Autumn, 1063
Gorddyar adar; gwlyb traeth;
Eglur nwyfre; ehalaeth
Ton. Gwyw calon rhag hiraeth.
A bright sky, seabirds mewling;
A wide wave, soaking the shore;
A heart, withering from hiraedd.
Llwyarch the Ancestor
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